Plagiarism rises amid funding cuts

BEHIND the wave of plagiarism and other forms of cheating
evident at our universities lies a bigger problem. Students paying
high fees and frustrated with what's on offer are answering in
kind, and getting away with whatever they can in a debased
education system that has become centred on a race for
credentials.

Particularly in expensive postgraduate courses, classes are
often not stimulating or rigorous because staff are teaching
students with very different language abilities and frames of
reference. Academics who are rushed and under pressure to "publish
or perish", or poorly paid casuals, often feel ill-prepared for the
challenges.

All of this adds up to an environment with little respect for
learning and in which students have become clients who feel
entitled to pass if they simply turn up regularly and submit an
essay that shows signs of trying. They are going through the hoops
to buy the piece of paper.

Even among people whose first language is English, few at
university write well-constructed essays. It is a relief when an
essay is coherent, never mind showing signs of original thought.
Often they are a mishmash of internet cut-and-paste jobs with the
odd joining sentence written in a different style. Sometimes it
seems a student has handed in notes undigested.

The confusion among many students is absolute. In the past, one
would write an essay by reading the prescribed texts, plus some
extra, and then perhaps putting them aside and producing one's own
take on the subject, or even a synthesis of what had been
read.Today, however, thanks to the internet, students can access
news stories, blogs and even academic work via search engines such
as Google Scholar, which searches scholarly literature across many
disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and
articles.

This wealth of material is intimidating. Those who are ambitious
appear to be deluged and those who are not are
undiscriminating.

Megan le Masurier, who lectures in media and communications at
the University of Sydney, says students are very good at collecting
information but not at getting the key points.

"Plagiarism is a sign of discontent," she says. "They think
their teachers are so busy. They want to be noticed and it's almost
a testing gesture, a payback, like a response to feeling
neglected.

"Also, if your motive for learning is instrumental, perhaps you
have a very different attitude to how you behave. It's a leap
across a boundary, into dishonesty and, in the real world, into
copyright infringements. But there is a sense in which it's an
educational issue, not a legal issue."

Funding cuts have forced universities to take in large numbers
of fee-paying overseas students. They number about 240,000, or a
quarter of the student body.

Australia's international student industry - which includes TAFE
and school students - is worth $9.8 billion. But as hard and
politically incorrect as it is to say, the problems are exacerbated
by the overseas student influx.

The anger level of English-as-first-language students is rising
as lecturers "dumb down" their teaching for international students,
who are left bewildered by the resentment they feel comes from the
first-language English speakers - after all, the international
students were actively recruited by the universities, and they sat
language tests which led them to believe they could make it.

Simon Marginson, a professor at the Centre for the Study of
Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, says overseas
students work hard, perhaps two or three times as hard as
first-language English speakers, on assignments. So the ease of
access to the internet and even the possibility of buying essays
become tempting.

It is not only overseas students who are plagiarising: academics
say Australian students do it, too, although more cleverly. They
are more difficult to detect because they have the confidence to
change the odd word, or to plagiarise lines of argument, as opposed
to slabs of text.

In the US a study of 50,000 undergraduates from 60 campuses,
conducted last year by the Centre for Academic Integrity at Duke
University, found 40 per cent admitted to cut-and-paste internet
plagiarism; 77 per cent believed such cheating was not a very
serious issue.

Data on plagiarism obtained by the Herald under freedom
of information legislation are the tip of the iceberg,
vice-chancellors' protestations aside. While some universities are
instituting rigorous plagiarism detection programs - and while some
staff are painstaking - it is often up to individual lecturers to
implement them, and many academics feel too guilty about the
standard of education and the blatant exploitation of students to
go on witch-hunts of any but the most glaring cases.

Anne Susskind, a former Herald journalist, has
taught at two Australian universities.